This would be a scenario for a city street encounter. Perhaps hand-to-hand fighting during a siege or invasion. The building interiors are not so important as the streets themselves. Objects to hide behind, etc.

I have some ideas on how to reduce the texture complexity through Photoshop surface blurring. I'm hoping that will keep the edges of objects more crisp at low jpeg resolution. I've repeated some buildings and elements here. Also I'll need to alter things up a bit. These are hastily re-purposed from an old project.

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Redrobes

05-07-2008, 06:06 PM

Hi Keith, Nice start. I was thinking about doing a road layout too as its squareish and not too colorful so I'll have to rethink now. I was considering as WWII type road block but we'll see.

Two tech things... First repeating stuff does help PNG but makes no difference to JPG and second, blurring helps JPG a lot but kills PNG. So a tip I would give is to pick one style of filetype and optimize for it but trying to do both may not work. My guess would be to go JPG and don't worry about the repeating blocks of texture.

Another small thing since I think this is your first challenge entry. I provide a link to a page of thumbnail entries (www.viewing.ltd.uk/Temp/CG/ChallengeTN/Challengers_May08.htm) so we can see the state of the nation in one glance and have quick links into those threads. Everyone gets an position on it but you have to tag successive new WIP piccies with a little script catching bit of text posted at the end just before you finish...

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...the next image is your thumb ref. You will see them on many other posts (all the posts that have thumb images). Then if you post a new WIP it will get snagged and formatted the next time its ran.

Links to the thumbs page are also (and normally) posted on the initial challenge description thread too.

keithcurtis

05-07-2008, 06:33 PM

Hi Keith, Nice start. I was thinking about doing a road layout too as its squareish and not too colorful so I'll have to rethink now. I was considering as WWII type road block but we'll see.

Two tech things... First repeating stuff does help PNG but makes no difference to JPG and second, blurring helps JPG a lot but kills PNG. So a tip I would give is to pick one style of filetype and optimize for it but trying to do both may not work. My guess would be to go JPG and don't worry about the repeating blocks of texture.

Another small thing since I think this is your first challenge entry. I provide a link to a page of thumbnail entries (www.viewing.ltd.uk/Temp/CG/ChallengeTN/Challengers_May08.htm) so we can see the state of the nation in one glance and have quick links into those threads. Everyone gets an position on it but you have to tag successive new WIP piccies with a little script catching bit of text posted at the end just before you finish...

### Latest WIP ###

...the next image is your thumb ref. You will see them on many other posts (all the posts that have thumb images). Then if you post a new WIP it will get snagged and formatted the next time its ran.

Links to the thumbs page are also (and normally) posted on the initial challenge description thread too.Thanks for the code tip, Redrobes. I'll edit.

The repeats are in there because this is a proof of concept using some bits I had lying about. I'm pretty experienced with compression algorithms and file types. I just didn't feel like filling up the whole thing with unique buildings and such until I was satisfied with where I was going. I never intended to use .png as a final format for any of this. It's created in Illustrator. I intend to save from there as a high quality bitmap format (as png or jpeg at full quality) as an interim step. There are things I can do in Photoshop to get the resultant filesize down with less compromise in quality than I would get directly from Illustrator.

Redrobes

05-07-2008, 06:47 PM

Cool - just updated it. Now just Sigured to persuade.

Looking forward to seeing your results !

keithcurtis

05-12-2008, 01:26 PM

New update. I removed the labels, they were making the jpeg artifacts too noticeable. I might try reducing the saturation. Less color contrast might reduce compression artifact noticeability even more. It's purely a psychological fix, but it might lend the image a nice sepia antique look as well.
Any opinions?

RobA

05-12-2008, 01:42 PM

It might not just be psychological... standard jpeg compression uses the YCbCr colourspace, so a lower contrast image may reduce more. (just speculating)